


Everything.

by Shamu



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: F/M, Gen, the incest isn't explict, you can read it in or out depending on your preference
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-02-17 20:33:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13084827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shamu/pseuds/Shamu
Summary: “Well, Korekiyo. The next story’s yours.”





	Everything.

**Author's Note:**

> Phew!!! This really took a lot out of me, haha. I’m really, really proud of this, though! There’s a lot of folklore: I tried to use good sources wherever possible, however, I’m no professional so please take it all with a grain of salt (ha.) 
> 
> Also, a massive, massive shout out to my friend Z . Without you, I don’t think I would ever have given myself so deep into our shared hell. I was thinking of you and our discussions a lot while writing, so I hope you don’t mind if I dedicate this piece to you. Thank you for everything.

“In the Anmatyerre tribe of central Australia, the women and children are taught to fear a great spirit called Twanyirika,” she begins. She’s speaking so softly, the cover of her futon pulled up to her chin. “Now, Korekiyo, what does central Australia look like?” 

She always begins stories like this. She needs to know the geography, paint the landscape. Peel back the walls of this room and let in the hot dust and red-whipped sand. “It’s a desert. Flat but peaks that jut out of the land like boils. Green shrubbery, snakes and kangaroos. Frequently subjected to bushfires, violently red as the earth it chars. ”  
  
“A harsh landscape, wouldn’t you say?” She smiles. “Can you imagine? We’d melt in the heat.” She glanced down, humming a laugh. He could tell she still wanted to see it, a melted puddle or otherwise.  
  
“Yeah, we would.”  
  
She smiled. “Well. Anyway. The Anmatyerre tribe have long adjusted to these conditions, and of all the things to fear between the heat and the fire and the venomous creatures - a child is taught that the scariest of them all is the great spirit Twanyirika. He grows up hearing, with the other children and the women, the sound of his eerie, booming call screeching from the bush. Whenever a male child is to become a man, he must face Twanyirika himself - be consumed by him and reborn.”  
  
“Not an uncommon theme,” he offered - kneeing next to her. “There are countless stories of man facing death only to come back stronger. Siberian shaman hallucinate having their own limbs shorn off and consumed right in front of them before they may practice their medicine and tricks…”  
  
She nods enthusiastically, a pale hand reaching to squeeze his knee.  
  
“Mmhm. That’s right. But there’s a little more to this story.”  
  
“Oh?” He tilts his head, bringing his hand over hers.  
  
She pulls it back, fluttering it on her chest.  
  
“So! The child grows up. His social unit is just a little cluster of his intimately known relatives, all of whom, in the heart of the desert, walk naked. He learns everything orally, written knowledge eschewed for the stories of his elders. He relies on them wholly, they are the secret-keepers to the universe. So he trusts in them, even, when he is just twelve and taken to be circumcised. He learns the stories of his ancestors through the twisting and turning of dancers, the present and the past mixed together all at once. And throughout it all, he is reminded that he must stay still, he must not cry out, he must remember that Twanyirika awaits. And he can hear the spirit, while all this is going on - his voice swelling out from the bush.”  
  
“Finally, the boy is circumcised. All the while, the tribesmen sing in thunderous, deep tones - so loud that they begin to drown out Twanyirika’s cries. Can you imagine? The madness of that moment, the way the world swirls as the men you trust so much pull your foreskin forwards and cut it off - you're so paralysed with awe and fear that you don’t even think to cry out. The smell of their bodies, the rounded sound blaring all around you, the frightful beast drawing ever closer.”  
  
“And then…” She looked up at him, smile widening.  
  
“And then. Out from the bush come other tribesmen, bull-roarers in their hands. They bring the little wooden instrument up to the boy’s wound, catching his blood. And they tell him, then - this simple little slat of wood, carved from a knife and swung round a man’s head, vibrating the air to produce a deep, eerie sound - they tell this child, this new-man, that _this_ is Twanyirika.”  
  
“‘Here is Twanyirika, of whom you have heard so much’”, She laughed at that, her fringe flopping over her eyes. “And so, the last of his childhood is destroyed. The final monster is slain. A joke to be laughed at, a screening technique to separate the men from the women, the adults from the children. Can you imagine that? Can you really, really imagine that?”  
  
He lifts a finger to his chin, rubbing the material of his face-mask. “Yes… quite the relief, I would imagine. And what a rush of _power._ If Twanyirika is just a joke, then all else must seem trivial. Ah… Sister! I can see why this story excited you so.”  
  
He beams at her, the room slowly fading in - the roar of the bull-roarers and the sound of strange songs and pounding feet being replaced by their quiet little home. Tatami mats and low candle-light, their whispers barely above breathing.  
  
She smiled back.  
  
“Well, Korekiyo. The next story’s yours.”  


* * *

Needless to say, anthropology had become somewhat of an addiction for them both.  
  
“Now, which story should I tell you today?”  
  
She was sleeping, but it wasn’t a natural sleep. He didn’t know if she could hear him, but that wasn’t to matter. Even like this, it was enjoyable just to speak to her.  
  
The air in the hospital was stagnant, the lights far too bright. The machine that pumped air into her made the most unpleasant noises, the air-conditioning unit humming just to the left of her bed. He hoped she would not listen to that drone, and would instead be lead by his voice.  
  
“… Should we look at some manga, dissect it together?”  
  
She lay unmoving, the world completely out of her reach. No matter. She was just like a caterpillar wrapped in its cocoon, the shaman deep in his transformative trance, changed into a bird and drifted far and away to the spirit plane - at any rate, she would soon be back.  
  
He reached into his bag, pulling out a parcel-shaped book. Leaning his head onto hers, careful not to dislodge the strings of tubes that flowed into her, he flipped it open.  


* * *

“Ah! Yes, there - you see the way they merge into each other to gain one another’s powers?” She asked, excitedly, pointing at the page.   
  
This was usually how things went. No matter what they were reading, they could never get through it at a quick pace. Everything had to be discussed, every mythology picked out and pointed at. Author-intent be damned, they could open anything and see the strings of the world pulsing through.  
  
“Mm. Yeah, I do.”  
  
“Well, notice how beautiful and androgynous their bonded form is,” she stroked her finger over the page. “Ah! Isn’t that such a common motif?”  
  
“Hmm… Yes. The Ancient Greeks thought that in the beginning, all peoples were joined together. Creatures of male-male, female-female, female-male varieties - powerful things that Zeus himself feared so much that he had to separate them. Romantically, they say that we - the decedents of those creatures, are always searching for our other half.” There was a briefest of pauses as they shared glances, a soft laugh tittering out of her.  
  
“Yes. And from Adam - the androgynous mirror of God, out from him came Eve. Angels with no genitals. Eunuchs trusted with holy power. Mmm, and even Yin-Yang, the perfect state of balance, the merging of the two halves back to the perfect one, the wholeness.”  
  
She stroked the page again, smiling wider.  
  
“And they really are beautiful, aren’t they?”  


* * *

  
She said none of this as she lay quietly in bed, his voice a river running over her. The world was still rolling outside, the pulse of it seen through those black and white pages. He analysed everything for her, every page another story, another insight, another thing that tied them to something far, far away from all this.  
  
It was so quiet without her voice singing the song of the world alongside him, but he wasn’t alone. She was here, in some way, in the sound of her machines - the warmth of her hand. Her consciousness just a tiny, frail ball - buried somewhere deep, deep inside of her. He hoped it was warm in there. He hoped it was a pleasant dream. 

He hoped she wasn’t alone. 

* * *

Sometimes, they’d sing. 

When they couldn’t play or grew tired of reading or she had a headache - sometimes they’d sing. Singing had curative powers, supposedly - but really, it just made for an excellent distraction. Folk-songs suited their voices best. It was the way they were meant to be sung, by unprofessionals, brimming with passion and a sense of purpose. Songs to pass the days, songs to honour the dead, songs to remember some event that history had long lost. 

And their singing, at least, could drown out the awful hum of those roaring machines.  


* * *

When they were younger, she a little healthier - they were still telling each other stories. Countless stories. Yes, with less detailed analysis - primitive interpretations, he was sure - but still, this was how they grasped the world. A thousand different threads, but in each moment they could pick just one. 

Better than that, it used to be that they didn’t just tell their tales through soft whispers over quiet candle light. Mother and Father worked long hours - and so, she’d raid their closet. She was particularly attached to Mother’s bridal furisode. The long sleeves, the draping train - matched with her hair, it was like everything flowed away from her.  
  
Of course, it was much too big for her. Nor was she particularly good at tying, worse still at doing her hair. He was equally hopeless. So there she was - a mess, no make-up, her hair loosely tied and sticking this way and that, in clothes that neither fitted nor entirely suited her - but in those moments, she transformed.  
  
They transformed.  
  
The walls of their house fell down, and suddenly they were up in the snow covered peaks. She became Princess Kaguya - a child born from bamboo, her eyes wide and staring up at the moon, longing to return but all the earthly attachments winding round her feet to keep her here. He’d hold onto her ankles and pretend to sob as she was dragged away by mythical forces.  
  
Or, she’d drop her hair - throwing the ornaments to the floor, wrapping herself up in her thick, black strands. A beautiful woman come to visit him, to tempt him - and he’d ask her to come to the bath. Run it until it was warm - beg her to join him. And when she finally did, she’d scream and disappearunder the water - a mess of bubbles, just a coil of thick black hair. The ice-woman melted. A fantasy as fleeting as snow.  
  
Or, she’d sneak up on him - padding quietly through the house, hair completely covering her face. And then she’d grab him by the mouth, whisper some chant in his ear, drag him back into hell and pretend to eat him. Sometimes he’d catch her first, run into the kitchen - drawing salt circles on the ground. Sometimes he’d throw the salt on her, watch as she wailed and writhed and melted into the ground - before bursting out into a laugh, melting the dark night and the freezing snow and bringing back a warmth louder than any fire. She’d get her revenge, she warned - pulling her face out through her hair.  
  
And he was any number of mythological creatures. He “borrowed” masks from his Father’s trips around the world, a Kitsune his favourite. But when he wasn’t a trickster fox, he was Mwaash aMbooy and Xipe Totec and Krampus - and each one filled his spirit with its own and suddenly he was so much more than himself. Suddenly these countless, stiff stories became real. It was all fun, wildly inaccurate, even - but all of it was something far, far away from here.  
  
“Stab me, Korekiyo, stab me harder. Stab me like you mean it! I took everything from you! I gobbled up your children and your wives and your siblings and you think stabbing me _like_ that will get you anywhere?” She’d scolded, once. He didn’t want to, but by her encouragement, he squeezed her ribs harder. And when that didn’t get him anywhere, he tickled his fingers down her sides and she roared out in ‘pain’, kicking him in the stomach with a laugh more ferocious than he’d ever heard. And with that weakness discovered, no matter what monster she changed herself into, he knew how to defeat her.  
  
Then she got tired too easily. 

Suddenly, she didn’t want to pretend she was a vengeful spirit anymore. He didn’t think that she grew out of it - after all, nothing seemed to embarrass her anymore. But she didn’t want to play those games anymore. 

* * *

Sometimes, he wondered if she was Kaguya. When she slipped away from them, disappeared into the sheets of the hospital bed, he wondered if that was the moon calling on her. Was the heavenly entourage coming to take her away, a feather robe to wipe away all of her sadness and compassion for the people of Earth?

* * *

Anthropology wasn’t just a way to peel back the four walls that always seemed to surround them. It was a shield to the world - a great knowing, a tap into the higher knowledge that only they knew how to turn on. They could see the knot that bound them all together, even if the ignorant fools around them couldn’t see the obvious. 

  
You see, their behaviour can be explained. All behaviour explained. Everything with a reason, everything with a story attached. It was so much more interesting to look at what compelled them to act in such a way, rather than being hurt by their words. Detached from the situation, looking at it like one of their many stories - life eased. Every instance just a mirrored reflection of one that had happened a trillion times before. To be made beautiful, precious in its own way.  
  
“So, you see, those bullies are simply exerting in-grouping behaviour. It’s an obvious human behaviour, no? Useful for creating homogenous societies, whom are much easier to manage and control.”  
  
“Ahh… Father’s detachment from us is a coping mechanism, his constant ‘overnight’ shifts just an escape. Like any victim of a Yuki-onna. He’ll suffer for it, in the end.”  
  
She was screaming at him.  
  
“You don’t understand any of this, any of it at all!” Her fingers gripped the cold railing of the hospital bed, her knuckles threatening to push through what was left of her skin. “You get to have a normal life,” she snapped, “You can learn languages and play instruments and travel the world, you’re going to get to go to high school and university and have all these nice, wonderful friends - while I’m sitting here just rotting in this… this disgusting, filthy, _rotting_ body.”  
  
“I can’t do _anything_ ,” she’d say, rolling her fingers over her eyes. “Except read. Read and read and read and read until my head turns to mush and the words don’t make any sense anymore. And… and you can. You can. You can do all this stuff. All that _living_.”  
  
He lowered his head, patiently listening.  
  
“All of it. You can do all of it, anything you want to. I… I can’t even taste anything anymore, did you know that? Everything’s just the same bland mush in my mouth. I’m so sick of this, I’m sick of this… ! And you’re just sitting here like my eulogy singer. I’m not dead! I’m not dead yet!”  
  
“So… why don’t you just leave? I’m serious. Stand up and go live somewhere else and be happy. Leave me alone here so I can… I can finally just, just, just rip my skin off. Rip it all off,” she lifted her fingers to her arms, nails digging into the skin. “Peel it all back so I can get out of this fucking prison!!”  
  
There was a tremble in his voice, but he looked at her, and said, “A selkie.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“The selkie tears its skin off and transforms into a seal. She can only maintain her human form for so long, often long enough to fall into a tragic love affair from which she must depart from - the sea forever calling her as her true home.”  
  
She looked at him poe-faced, her mouth parting.  
  
“Or the Squonk, an American creature whose skin is so ill-fitting, covered in warts and blemishes that cause it to become ashamed of its appearance. It spends much of its time weeping. Clever hunters who try to catch it are often baffled, for on capture, it will dissolve completely into a pool of tears.”  
  
Her lips trembled.  
  
“Or perhaps you’re…”  
  
She laughed, she was laughing loud and clear.  
  
“You’re trying to analyse me, is that it, sweet Korekiyo?”  
  
She buried her face in her hands.  
  
“I… I must apologise.”  


* * *

She died. 

He stopped thinking that she’d returned to the moon, or that the sea had called on her, or that she was on some epic journey within herself - waiting to be returned stronger than ever.   
  
And though they’d read a thousand, million stories about death - it’s trappings, it’s grief, it’s effect on every single behaviour anyone could think of…. None of them came to mind. It was like all his memories had been stripped away and there was just a great wide nothingness.  
  
All her wires had come undone, the threads that bound them snapped. There was no knot at the centre of the universe. Everything was disconnected, far-flung and moving ever further away. Alone. Getting colder.  
  
He’s not scared of anything, anymore.  


* * *

The cord’s bound too tight, his neck drawn back like he’s stargazing. The noise is impossible to bear, deep throated chanting thunderously enveloping him. The ropes bleed into him like the endless tubes that fed into her. Nothing makes any sense. Not that, not this - his hair spilling out of his head and drowning the room, pouring out of this paper house and coiling round the whole world. Winding round their necks. Down their throats. Suffocating them all. Suffocating every single thing.  
  
The world goes to scratches and stars, his lungs aching in a red hot burn that takes his consciousness. And suddenly he’s not so helpless, rigid and stiff - unable to move. Suddenly he’s crawling along his own hair, fluid and shapeless, spilling outwards. Spilling upwards.  
  
Nothing, nothing. It’s a great wide nothing.  
  
And then there was light.  
  
And then there was warmth.  
  
The cords slid round him, all the lines of every story like thin movie reels, swirling through his hair. The single red rope around his neck. A tangling of hospital tubes. Vines bearing roses, obi ties and belts, bandages wrapped around a body, wrapped around his hands. Blood lines, rivers, stiff kanji black lines of ink, the flow of time like one huge line that pointed straight to.  
  
Her.  
  
She’s standing there. Her face a mess of lines. Pale and naked, her hair like cracks in her skin revealing an infinitely dark sky.  
  
There’s the roar of the hospital. That eerie call of the air conditioning, the screeching, booming gasp that came from her ventilator. It’s so loud, it’s all he can hear, and there’s nothing more frightening in the world because when he hears it he can’t see her.  
  
But then behind him, her fingers slipping over his mouth. And as soon as her fingers brush his lips, everything goes silent.  
  
He can feel her body at his back. It’s a shape he’s so used to, a shape that’s so unmistakably hers. And she’s warm. She’s so so so warm.  
  
But it’s not until she whispers in his ear that he finally understands.  
  
He understands all of it.  
  
Every single thing.  
  
“Here is Death, of whom you have heard so much.”  
  
She’s laughing.  
  
It was all a joke! Do you get it? All of this, this whole time - a secret for only those who have been initiated. The curtain peels back, the cry of the machines pumping air into her tired lungs just the bull-roarers calling from the bush. She’s laughing, she’s laughing - Death had been twirling all around them, driving them mad, making them afraid. But don’t you see, Korekiyo? The last of your childhood is gone, this was the secret! The final monster slain.  
  
Don’t you feel relieved?  
  
Don’t you feel powerful?  


Doesn’t it all just seem… so trivial, now? 

All that suffering was just to make the punchline funnier.  


“I have so much to tell you.”  
  
“I know it all already.”  
  
She lifts herself up, twirls through the air. Earth stretches out long and far away, every person and every place and every story at the tips of her fingers. She’s looking at him, her hair covering all of her face except for her smile.  
  
“Now go. Go and do all that stuff. All that _living_.”  
  
She’s laughing, she’s laughing, he’s laughing. Whirling their own bull-roarers, the secret theirs to keep. 

Earth comes back to him, and suddenly, everything’s connected. 

We’re never alone. 

クククククククククククククク


End file.
